Post-Tony, Yet Not Anti-Tony

The Glorious Successor is being pressed to offer a radical reform programme. Gosh. Another one. Modernisers - such dynamic and imaginative personalities as Hazel Blears, James Purnell, and the nice lady in charge of gravitating Lottery money into the Black Hole of Olympia - believe that Gordon should now be offering "a clearer sense of the concrete priorities to which we are committed". The priorities "need to symbolise our ideals and principles", above and beyond the obvious ones of privatisation, incarceration, deportation and surveillance. The Glorious Successor is urged to adopt "a future agenda which is post-Blair, not anti-Blair; building on the achievements of the past decade, not running away from them"; presumably by privatising more, incarcerating more, deporting more and snooping more. Admittedly, it is difficult to see how Gordon could summon up greater enthusiasm for this agenda than he has already displayed; but, as always, the dull and divided perceptions of the confused and blinkered voters constitute the most formidable obstacle to New New Labour's modernising zeal. For one thing, despite the efforts of successive Home Secretaries and angels of mercy like Liam Byrne, "the public no longer view the Conservatives as the 'nasty party' of the 1990s". For another, "while voters demand ambitious policy ends, they are increasingly resistant to the means to reach [them]"; even though the said means are undoubtedly the only viable ones given the presently operative situational paradigm: namely the aforementioned privatisation, incarceration, deportation and surveillance. The modernisers' proposed solution - a flurry of abstract nouns as uncompromised in its management-consultancy mediocrity as it is eloquent in its bureaucratic cack-handedness - shows that Tony's guiding light remains yet unextinguished amid the ever-thickening fog that is New New Labour: "We need to provide a stronger narrative about the overall purpose of a Labour government and the direction it wishes to take the country in". Gosh. Another one.